Hiring A Personal Virtual Assistant
Personal virtual assistants have received a lot of attention during the past few years. Much of this attention has come from the success of Timothy Ferriss’ book The Four Hour Work Week. In the book, Ferris outlines strategies to eliminate one’s daily busy work by outsourcing tasks to a low-cost virtual assistant, or VA. Business executives can use personal virtual assistants to handle tasks such as, web design
, web edits, blog installations, posting, and maintenance, accounting and bookkeeping, appointment setting Things to avoid would be one-time tasks that would take less time to do yourself than it would to explain to a third party.
2. Compose a detailed description of the tasks at hand, and a step by step guide your virtual assistant can follow to properly execute them. Specifically outline:
* Exactly what it is you are looking for. Do your tasks require voice related skills, writing skills, or both?
* What schedule you need your VA to work. This is particularly important if you are outsourcing to a different country.
* Communication. Would you rather correspond with your assistant via phone or email?
3. Browse the web to find the personal assistant that would be best for you. Ask around to see if anyone in your network has employed a virtual assistant and solicit their input. If nobody you know has used a VA, try the following:
* Google
* freelancer websites such as elance or guru
* Craig’s List